"Oh, I see," said Percival; "I hadn't thought of that."

"Only it can't," continued Mauburn. "Hang it all, that blasted old beggar will be eighty-nine, you know, in a fortnight. There simply can't be any issue of the marriage, and that--that blasted--"

"Better not try to describe her--while I'm by, you know," said Mrs.

Drelmer, sympathetically.

"Well--his wife--you know, will simply worry him into the grave a bit sooner, I fancy--that's all can possibly come of it."

"Well, old man," said Percival, "I don't pretend to know the workings of my sister's mind, but you ought to be able to win a girl on your own merits, t.i.tle or no t.i.tle."

"Awfully good of you, old chap. I'm sure she does care for me."

"But of course it will be only fair to sis to lay the matter before her just as it is."

"To be sure!" Mauburn a.s.sented.

"And now, thank the Lord, we're under way. Doesn't that breeze save your life, though? We'll eat here on deck."

The _Viluca_ swung into mid-stream, and was soon racing to the north with a crowded Fall River boat.

"But anyway," concluded Percival, after he had explained Mauburn's position to his sister, "he's a good fellow, and if you suit each other even the unexpected wouldn't make any difference."

"Of course not," she a.s.sented, "'the rank is but the guinea's stamp,' I know--but I wasn't meaning to be married for quite a time yet, anyway,--it's such fun just being engaged."

"A mint julep?" Mauburn was inquiring of one who had proposed it. "Does it have whiskey in it?"

"It does," replied Percival, overhearing the question; "whiskey may be said to pervade, even to infest it. Try five or six, old man; that many make a great one-night trouble cure. And I can't have any one with troubles on this Cunarder--not for the next thirty days. I need cheerfulness and rest for a long time after this day in town. Ah!

General Hemingway says that dinner is served; let's be at it before the things get all hot!"

CHAPTER XXVII.

A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes

It was a morning early in November. In the sedate Milbrey dining-room a brisk wood-fire dulled the edge of the first autumn chill. At the breakfast-table, comfortably near the hearth, sat Horace Milbrey. With pointed spoon he had daintily scooped the golden pulp from a Florida orange, touched the tips of his slender white fingers to the surface of the water in the bowl, and was now glancing leisurely at the headlines of his paper, while his breakfast appet.i.te gained agreeable zest from the acid fruit.

On the second page of the paper the names in a brief item arrested his errant glance. It disclosed that Mr. Percival Bines had left New York the day before with a party of guests on his special car, to shoot quail in North Carolina. Mr. Milbrey glanced at the two sh.e.l.ls of the orange which the butler was then removing.

"What a hopeless brute that fellow was!" he reflected.. He was recalling a dictum once p.r.o.nounced by Mr. Bines. "Oranges should never be eaten in public," he had said with that lordly air of dogmatism characteristic of him. "The only right way to eat a juicy orange is to disrobe, grasp the fruit firmly in both hands and climb into a bath-tub half full of water."

The finished epicure shuddered at the recollection, poignantly, quite as if a saw were being filed in the next room.

The disagreeable emotion was allayed, however, by the sight of his next course--_oeufs aux saucissons_. Tender, poetic memories stirred within him. The little truffled French sausages aroused his better nature. Two of them reposed luxuriously upon an egg-divan in the dainty French baking-dish of dull green. Over them--a fitting baptism, was the rich wine sauce of golden brown--a sauce that might have been the tears of envious angels, wept over a mortal creation so faultlessly precious.

Mrs. Milbrey entered, news of importance visibly animating her. Her husband arose mechanically, placed the chair for her, and resumed his fork in an ecstasy of concentration. Yet, though Mrs. Milbrey was full of talk, like a charged siphon, needing but a slight pressure to pour forth matters of grave moment, she observed the engrossment of her husband, and began on the half of an orange. She knew from experience that he would be deaf, for the moment, to anything less than an alarm of fire.

When he had lovingly consumed the last morsel he awoke to her presence and smiled benignantly.

"My dear, don't fail to try them, they're exquisitely perfect!"

"You really _must_ talk to Avice," his wife replied.

Mr. Milbrey sighed, deprecatingly. He could remember no time within five years when that necessity had not weighed upon his father's sense of duty like a vast boulder of granite. He turned to welcome the diversion provided by the _rognons sautees_ which Jarvis at that moment uncovered before him with a discreet flourish.

"Now you really must," continued his wife, "and you'll agree with me when I tell you why."

"But, my dear, I've already talked to the girl exhaustively. I've pointed out that her treatment of Mrs. Wybert--her perverse refusal to meet the lady at all, is quite as absurd as it is rude, and that if Fred chooses to marry Mrs. Wybert it is her duty to act the part of a sister even if she cannot bring herself to feel it. I've a.s.sured her that Mrs. Wybert's antecedents are all they should be; not ill.u.s.trious, perhaps, but eminently respectable. Indeed, I quite approve of the Southern aristocracy. But she constantly recalls what that sn.o.bbish Bines was unfair enough to tell her. I've done my utmost to convince her that Bines spoke in the way he did about Mrs. Wybert because he knew she was aware of those ridiculous tales of his mother's illiteracy. But Avice is--er--my dear, she is like her mother in more ways than one. a.s.suredly she doesn't take it from me."

He became interested in the kidneys. "If Marie had been a man," he remarked, feelingly, "I often suspect that her fame as a _chef_ would have been second to none. Really, the suavity of her sauces is a never-ending delight to me."

"I haven't told you yet the reason--a new reason--why you must talk to Avice."

"The money--yes, yes, my dear, I know, we all know. Indeed, I've put it to her plainly. She knows how sorely Fred needs it. She knows how that beast of a tailor is threatening to be nasty--and I've explained how invaluable Mrs. Wybert would be, reminding her of that lady's generous hint about the rise in Federal Steel, which enabled me to net the neat little profit of ten thousand dollars a month ago, and how, but for that, we might have been acutely distressed. Yet she stubbornly clings to the notion that this marriage would be a _mesalliance_ for the Milbreys."

"I agree with her," replied his wife, tersely.

Mr. Milbrey looked perplexed but polite.

"I quite agree with Avice," continued the lady. "That woman hasn't been right, Horace, and she isn't right. Young Bines knew what he was talking about. I haven't lived my years without being able to tell that after five minutes with her, clever as she is. I can read her. Like so many of those women, she has an intense pa.s.sion to be thought respectable, and she's come into money enough--G.o.d only knows how--to gratify it. I could tell it, if nothing else showed it, by the way in which she overdoes respectability. She has the thousand and one artificial little rules for propriety that one never does have when one has been bred to it. That kind of woman is certain to lapse sooner or later. She would marry Fred because of his standing, because he's a favourite with the smart people she thinks she'd like to be pally with.

Then, after a little she'd run off with a German-dialect comedian or something, like that appalling person Normie Whitmund married."

"But the desire to be respectable, my dear--and you say this woman has it--is a mighty lever. I'm no cynic about your s.e.x, but I shudder to think of their--ah--eccentricities if it should cease to be a factor in the feminine equation."

"It's nothing more than a pa.s.sing fad with this person--besides, that's not what I've to tell you."

"But you, yourself, were not averse to Fred's marrying her, in spite of these opinions you must secretly have held."

"Not while it seemed absolutely necessary--not while the case was so brutally desperate, when we were actually pressed--"

"Remember, my dear, there's nothing magic in those ten thousand dollars. They're winged dollars like all their mates, and most of them, I'm sorry to say, have already flown to places where they'd long been expected."

Mrs. Milbrey's sensation was no longer to be repressed. She had toyed with the situation sufficiently. Her husband was now skilfully dissecting the devilled thighs of an immature chicken.

"Horace," said his wife, impressively, "Avice has had an offer of marriage--from--"

He looked up with new interest.

"From Rulon Shepler."

He dropped knife and fork. Shepler, the man of mighty millions! The undisputed monarch of finance! The cold-blooded, calculating sybarite in his lighter moments, but a man whose values as a son-in-law were so ideally superb that the Milbrey ambition had never vaulted high enough even to overlook them for one daring moment! Shepler, whom he had known so long and so intimately, with never the audacious thought of a union so stupendously glorious!

"Margaret, you're jesting!"

Mrs. Milbrey scorned to be dazzled by her triumph.